A Sad Collapse in Student Preparation at UC San Diego Was Inevitable
aei.org
aei.org
The spread of things like ChatGPT is going to make things worse. And there's a whole lot of parents who are certain their precious offspring are (well) above average. Wasn't that a feature of Lake Wobegone? EDIT: and how common is the attitude "I paid a lot for your product, give me the grades..."?
To what extent was grade inflation of young men during the 60s and 70s common place due to the draft for the Vietnam war?
It seems to me that there's a likely possibility that professors and graders would be more willing to go easy on male students to prevent them from being sent to fight in Vietnam.
I wonder if anyone has done analysis on the grades from the era has has detected a measurable different.
There are school systems where teachers are not allowed to give anything less than a D equivalent grade, even if the student didn't engage with the assignment at all. I would panic if I found out my kid went to such a school!
Then there are the systems which only teach "theoretical" work. I had a student who said he could program, passed a bunch of classes called "programming in C++" and such, only to learn he hadn't written a program ever -- he had just been taught the theory of writing a program. It's like taking calculus but never doing an integral.
Updated Wed, June 8, 2022 at 5:29 AM
https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/0...
For fourth straight year, no students test proficient in math at Baltimore high school
Updated Tue, September 16, 2025 at 10:14 AM
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
Zero students test math proficient in 23 schools, as Maryland boosts funding by $2 billion
Updated Wed, September 17, 2025 at 10:31 PM
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-student...
It wouldn't have been given a C, and I say this as someone who was a TF/TA for these kinds of classes at UCSD tier programs, and as such spent hours grading these kinds of essays.
I think there are flaws with the article's argument, but your retort is not touching on those.
And yes, my grammar suck - to get back on (your) topic.
Just because OP is being snotty doesn't mean you aren't as well. If I were grading either of you guys in an academic context (which I spent sleepless nights on in my academic career) I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question because you are ignoring the prompt and not engaging with the content.
Perhaps by you, in one particular context (as a grader in an English class?). Your particular practice doesn't create universal truth by fiat.
> I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question
This is funny, because you are arbitrarily assuming my goals are whatever yours are here. In the academic context, you're going into a random classroom and handing out grades without even checking what the assignment is.
The only problem with this sentence I can see is that we serve people's interests, not their interest. That might be considered a grammar error - we expect plural objects (interests) for plural subjects (youths). It doesn't seem like a catastrophic one, the sentence can still be easily understood.
By the way, I'm aware I'm a comma splicer. I casually break grammatical rules when I feel like making things read more like how I talk.
That's the worst, most tortured string of English I've read all month.
In the UK you needed to have at least a C in maths and English to study at a university. This was 17 years ago.
This was not negotiable and I believe applied to all universities and all courses.
Note: I'm just curious, not even from the US
One in three LCFF+ admits end up in remedial math, and the total remedial math population is more than 50% LCFF+ admits.
What was the motivator for this post-2020 change? Equity, or the idea that outcomes for all groups should be equal (regardless of time/energy expended, of course).
Pretty unbelievable, considering how hard it is to get into UCSD if you're not from an LCFF+ school. It's basically a huge thumb on the scale, from an admissions perspective.
This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest).
Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win.
Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s.
Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction.
That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy.
Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s.
Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays.
This is not it at all. The removal of SAT / ACT requirements has more to do about university pipelines and budgets, rather than social justice.
As with any metric, when you introduce it, people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores.
That the requirement hasn't come back since is a matter of inertia; deciding to drop a requirement because it is impacting the short-term student pipeline is a decision the administration makes because they're losing money now. Bringing it back has to be justified by the lower ranks who are impacted by admitting unprepared students. Admin doesn't feel that pain. It's a much harder and longer process to show the lack of the standard is harming the university in the long term. Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
Thanks for the well thought out response. If possible, can you make this a post as well? It provides a lot of context I and others were not aware of.
I wish this was the messaging used by UCs back then. As an outsider, it felt like the primary driver was the "equity" portion. But maybe it was just an issue of the loudest voices being the most heard.
> Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
That tracks. I guess the messaging that evolved around equity may have just been coincidence due to the overlapping timelines, and the perception of a causal relationship formed.
> people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
Sorry to start a separate conversation, but what other metric can you use then? SAT/ACT with academic achievement in HS in comparison to peers seems to provide the best bang for buck while ensuring some base amount of meritocracy.
Extracurriculars inherently skew towards those with money and free time, essays themselves skew towards those who have the time to edit and massage them (eg. My HS's AP Lang Class always turned into a college essay editing class during application season), and recruitment directly from feeder schools like 50-70 years ago as well as legacy admissions is inherently unequal.
Personally, I'd rather we leverage open admissions with weeder programs similar to what is leveraged in Germany because that at least allows us to sidestep sorting and gives everyone an equal chance to take a shot.
In India too many colleges didn't keep their entrance exams and used 12th standard marks to admit people that year. But the next year it was back to normal.
Which would mean if we were willing to shut things down like we did we should be willing to take the secondary effects and solve those problems too.
Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism.
It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk...
I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
On the other hand, negative performance trends started in the early 2010s, and this may be more associated with the phone-based childhood.
It's without doubt that lower income high schools have lower academic outcomes.
This leads to the conclusion that only students from wealthy districts should be admitted to higher education.
Because we would never want to fund school districts equally.
That would be commonism...